Trade Me, the place ‘where Kiwi’s buy and sell’, has become a household name in NZ. Started in 1999, Trade Me introduced a novel concept - people sending money to sellers they’ve never met, for goods they had never seen. But it caught on! In the last year, Trade Me has strengthened the business significantly investing in a Marketing Automation platform (Marketo) to address market inefficiencies, the lack of data-driven marketing and the fact that no one knew who opened what email and when!

Trade Me had to get this marketing automation implementation right. It wasn’t just a matter of buying a new platform but setting up the key assets, new processes and scripts for scalability. So it created a team dedicated to the huge task of taking Trade Me on this new journey.

They created all the best practice assets from scratch such as new briefs, Playbooks, Style Guides, a powerful Marketo script, new preference centre and checklists to ensure scalability. At the same time, Trade Me used the new system to implement a Reactivation programme. Never before had Trade Me had the capability to create a marketing campaign that involved a series of automated, data-driven emails and measure campaign results within hours.

It worked! Implementing this new system, developing new processes and launching a Reactivation automation for members has been a huge success:

A 74% reduction in time to execute campaigns

A 95% increase in the number of targeted data-driven automations

Created a new automation team and up-weighted staff by 600%

Lapsed members were very engaged in a new Reactivation programme, using Trade Me 123% more than the control

30% of campaigns are now automations with open rates 120% above industry standard